Category: Privacy
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Bye, bye, Spotify! It was nice while it lasted
I have been a Spotify user for years. They don’t offer all the world’s music, but it is close. Recordings that I never would have bought, and so I never would have heard, just a click away. Absolutely amazing. World-altering, for music lovers. Now I’m leaving. Why? Because not even the NSA is accused of…
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We need open-source firmware
Kapersky reports that hackers in the “Equation Group” (see Ars Technica coverage) infiltrated the firmware of most major hard drive manufacturers: rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers … on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived…
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Independent web principles
Posting my list here, because putting them on Twitter only would just be too ironic: 1. Keep the master copy of all data you create in a way that nobody can prevent you from keep using that data For example, if I write a beautiful poem on Gmail (it is Valentine’s day after all), Google…
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We Want Root
When you buy an iPhone, do you actually get to own it? Apple is doing its darnedest to make changes impossibe that you might want to do but that they don’t approve of, even after you paid a lot of money for the device. Does not sound like ownership to me. It wasn’t always that…
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Nest responds to my privacy questions
I had asked Nest/Google support some privacy-related questions about their thermostat. Here is their response (minus the customer service “Your question is important to us” fluff which I deleted). Hotlinks and slightly strange grammar in the original. I’ll analyze it below: Here’s an excellent read on your Privacy Statement. This will tell you all of…